Welcome Sophie Alexandra McNaught!

Well the race is finally over. Sophie arrived before the stuff from the boat but only by a hair. It all started with me wishing my Mom a good trip at 2:00am on my Sunday, the 10th of Aug. I had forgotten to call her the day before and couldn’t sleep until I knew if she had any other questions as to what to bring with her. After assuring myself that she was prepared and off to a good start on her trip, I was able to sleep in till 7am. Yes, that is sleeping in for me lately.

Sunday morning we all got up and prepared for our weekly trip to the farm. We cleaned up the house in preparation for my Mom’s arrival, packed up the hospital bag for me, over night bag for Michael and Blake and got all of Rocky’s stuff together. We have been preparing this way for our farm trips for the last two weeks. It was our hope that I would go into labor while already in Murwillumbah so I wouldn’t have to drive an hour to the hospital. We finally left the house a little after 9:30am.

About 10:20 I started leaking. At first I thought I just pee’d myself, which starts to happen in the last weeks of pregnancy. My pants felt really wet and I was concerned about my new car seats so I checked to see if the wetness went all the way through. It did and when I pulled my hand out it was blood, not water or pee. I told Michael to pull over and get towels out of the boot (trunk). At this point I still more worried about the car than myself. As I got out to put the towels down, lots more blood started coming out. At this point I knew something was wrong.

I got back in the car and we started driving towards the hospital. I called them up to let them know I was coming, but when I told them what had happened, they told me to turn around and go back to Tweed Heads. Tweed is a town about halfway between our home and the farm with a much bigger hospital than Murwillumbah and they were more able to deal with our emergency. We had just passed the city so we turned around and were at the hospital at about 10:35am.

When I arrived no one seemed too concerned and I even walked myself up to the maternity ward. At this point I was not in any pain myself. I explained to the nurses what happened and they had call from Murwillumbah so they were waiting for me. At first they weren’t concerned either. I took my pants off and showed them how much I had bled and then they started acting.

They stuck me on the bed and started putting in IV’s and monitoring equipment. They couldn’t find the heart beat of the baby so they hooked up the ultrasound machine and found that the baby’s heart beat had dropped to 60. They had thought this was my heart beat on the monitor before they could tell from the ultrasound that it was the baby’s. At this point they rushed me into the “theater” or what we in America call the operating room for an emergency c-section. The doctor was talking to me while they were waiting for the anesthesia to start working to explain what they were going to do. The blessed nurse came in, demanded them to just put me out and get that baby out now. I truly believe this nurse is the whole reason my baby is alive today. We are so blessed that she was on duty.

They choked me to put me out faster, which is the worst of the whole experience that I remember, and at 11:09am Sophie was pulled out. Her heart beat was really slow and she wasn’t breathing. I was still out so I don’t know much about what happened after that, but the team there worked miracles and though on a respirator she was mostly breathing by herself by the time I came through. One of the nurses came in on her day off and monitored Sophie all during the day. She had to hold the respirator in as Sophie kept pulling it out and moving too much. In the evening, Sophie was transported to Brisbane and an ICN (we call it ICU) ward. I was to follow the next day.

Sophie was put on ice incase there was swelling of the brain and also to help with lactic acid in her muscles. She seemed to recover quickly as we were told it would be a 72 hour treatment but it was only 48 hours. It was really painful for us to see her cold and shivering but we figured they would know what was best for her. She was able to come off the ice and the brain probes the 12th of Aug and I was able to hold her. Up to this point I am the only one that has held her. They moved her from ICN to the Special Care ward that day as well.

It took her a day but her last temperature reading was 36.4 which is near normal. (Celsius that is remember.) She is starting on breast milk and we are looking forward to when they can take the IV out. She doesn’t eat from me yet, but sometimes in the night she can’t sleep and they let me go down and cuddle her for a bit. We hope that by Friday she will be eating normally. She’s got all of her color back and is a very pretty baby, though I am a bit biased. With all that was going on we didn’t get many measurements. They guessed that she was 3300 grams in weight but that was after the pumped her full of fluids again. That is about 7lbs for those in America. We still don’t know how long she is.

Further updates on Sophie, myself, and the rest of the family to come, stay posted.